National Geographic Bee champ from Sugar Land credits win to ‘a good guess’

Rahul Nagvekar chalked up his victory in this week’s National Geographic Bee to an educated guess.

“It was a guess, a 50-50 chance,” said the eighth-grader from Sugar Land. “It just happened to be a good guess.”

The 14-year-old Texan’s guess — the German city of Regensburg — was the correct answer to the question about the Bavarian city located on the Danube River which was a legislative seat of the Holy Roman Empire from 1663 to 1806.

The son of two Houston engineers, Nagvekar went into Thursday’s finals with a significant lead but faced a tense tiebreaker against second-place finisher Vansh Jain, 13, of Wisconsin. Varun Mahadevan, 13, a student in Fremont, Calif., took third place.

Nagvekar and Jain had finished the championship round tied after five questions. Next, they were asked a series of tiebreakers in a sudden death round. For the first three, both wrote down the correct answer. On the fourth, only Nagvekar was correct.

Nagvekar — a student at Quail Valley Middle School in Missouri City and the son of immigrants from India — emerged from an original field of four million students to win a $25,000 college scholarship and an all-expenses-paid trip to the Galapagos Islands.

Nagvekar’s mother, Urmila Sabnis, said her son just loves geography, but also is interested in math and science and is an accomplished pianist. Sabnis said that helping her son train required her to do a lot of research with her husband, chemical engineer Munoj Nagvekar.

“I have been reading and reading and reading …just to be able to make it tough,” said the software engineer who’s originally from India. “He wouldn’t take a question if it was easy.”

Nagvekar said maps have fascinated him for years, but he’s not sure what he’ll study when he gets to college in a few years. He started preparing for the geography bee in fourth grade and has gone to the state bee every year, placing higher each time.

The first-time contender in the national competition will receive a $25,000 college scholarship along with a trip to the Galapagos Islands. It was the third time a student from Texas has won the bee in the past four years.

The National Geography Bee was developed by the National Geographic Society in 1989 in response to concerns that America’s youths were ignorant of geography. Last year, the Department of Education reported that only half of U.S. fourth-graders could correctly rank, in descending order of size, North America, the United States, California and Los Angeles.

About four million students from fourth to eight grade took part in the contest. On Tuesday, 54 national finalists from each state, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories, faced off in a semi-final leaving 10 final contestants for the televised final, hosted by “Jeopardy!” host Alex Trebek.

Nagvekar, who also participated in the National Science Bowl last year, said he studied nearly every day. He appeared calm throughout the contest, despite facing several veterans under the camera lights.

Sabnis credited her son’s victory to his fortuitous desire to practice using as few clues as possible. She said her son only wanted the hardest questions in practice, and was adamant about learning facts in their context, using maps, atlases and books, rather than rote memorization of lists.

As it turned out, the contest had several rounds in which higher points were awarded for answers based on minimal information, such as the shape of a lake, without any reference to the continent, much less the country, where it was located.

Google co-sponsored the event for the fourth consecutive year. Brian McClendon, vice president of Google Earth and Google Maps, said this year’s contest was the hardest he has seen yet. The questions are devised by researchers at National Geographic with help from an outside advisory panel.

Google vice president Vint Cerf, often considered the father of the Internet, said the contest showed that “the future of the country is in the hands of kids who actually know where everything is.”

This post is based on reporting by Carolyn Lochhead of the Washington bureau and the Associated Press.